Among the many communities served by the Internet, few have had as immediate a grasp of its essential utility as the school teachers and students who have discovered the expanded resources and expanded community offered by the network [Honey and Henriquez 1993, Rutkowski 1994]. Although network access has often been difficult to obtain and only a few percent of this audience are currently online [Abrams and Clement 1994], the technology of wide-area networking has already made a major impact in educational circles. It serves as a powerful mechanism for the implementation of programs for educational reform, helps to end the isolation from society of the traditional classroom and offers a promise of information equity to a nation that invests in connectivity for all school classrooms.
With the rapid rise of Internet use within the school population, there has been a corresponding growth in services aimed at this audience. Recently a flock of commercial ventures have come on the scene, but the backbone of support for most teachers and students new to the Internet remains the free services that have been in existence since teachers first gained Internet access. One of the oldest such services is the KIDSPHERE mailing list, which is the subject of the present article. This mailing list is distinguished by its relatively long history and by its consistent focus upon students and teachers and upon the practice of teaching with the use of Internet resources. The social phenomena which surround and support KIDSPHERE are shared by many other online services, both those which serve education and those which serve other online communities. This article tries to identify some of these phenomena, to describe how services of this sort are utilized and what their perceived value is to their community of subscribers. We argue that sustained support for these services is a good investment of the nation's education dollars.